Opera is my favourite browser, and the final release of the newest version has just been released to the public.
It’s blazing fast, and comes with a lot of stuff out of the box such as:
- Integrated ad blocker (right click on a page and choose Block Content…, then you can click on what you want to block)
- Mouse gestures
- Mail and chat client
- Widgets
- Speed dial (If you create a new tab, you get a patchwork of thumbnails of your selected favourite sites so they’re one click away)
- Pretty much everything that a lot of other browsers had to follow suit with after Opera had innovated them, and usually need to be downloaded in an extension or plug-in.
The other modern browsers are also moving forward fast, with FireFox 3 out next Tuesday, with Safari and IE’s next efforts due out in the near future.
The main downfall of Opera is its small market share; this means a lot of sites don’t work in it even though it’s arguably the most modern and standards-compliant browser, simply through lack of people testing things in Opera.
Incidentally, Opera is a popular mobile browser and is also used as the web browser in the Nintendo Wii.
